Dell's Dimension E521 along with a few other models bring back Windows XP

Dell will once again offer XP on home PC and notebook models

Dell will again offer the Windows XP operating system due to high customer demand on the company's community feedback forum, IdeaStorm. Dell, like most major PC manufacturers stopped selling Windows XP licenses with its PCs after the launch of Windows Vista.

By the end of March 2007, Dell only offered two computer models that home users could order with XP preinstalled rather than Vista -- many business PCs and notebooks still came with XP as an option.

We're fortunate that MS has continued to update XP to where it is today. Your bitching about a $20 difference in OEM pricing is what holds MS back from releasing newer software. XP is fine, but there is no reason why MS should continue supporting it.

Buisnesses will change naturaly as they always have. When their hardware dies. I may be wrong but I beleive I read that XP will be supported till 2011. That timeline would fall in perfectly with how long 98 was supported.

Many of the buisnesses albeit smaller ones that we deal with are still running 98. Buisnesses have a way of leaving something in place as long as humanly possible as long as it's working and not too excruciating to use.

Vista isn't going to go anywhere, there was the same debates and pontification about XP and even 2000 when it came out. Change is inevitable, and it is good.

Vista is garbage and offers very little incentive to upgrade unless you're the manager of an office full of morons who you cant trust not to fill their computers with viruses and spyware.

Vista is slower, clunkier, more resource hungry, and more of nag than XP and offers very little to reward you for putting up with all of that.

I won't be "upgrading" to it ever and my business won't either. MS's best case is that most people will leapfrog Vista and upgrade to its successor in 2009 (IF they do a better job) - otherwise Apple will eventually no longer be able to resist releasing OSX-PC.

Yes, it does have higher system requirements, and yes UAC is annoying as hell. Other than that, though, I'm quite happy with Vista and if you have a machine not too old, I'd say jump for it. So does that make me an MS employee?

1. If you hate UAC that much, it's very easily turned off. Just don't expect it to be any more secure than XP afterwards.

2. Vista runs just as well for me as XP did, and I play a lot of games and have a very wide spectrum of software that runs on Vista just fine. And believe me, it's not stuff that was optimized for Vista.

So I guess I'm an MS employee too then. I've had a terrific experience with Vista and I've been using it since launch. Now that the Nvidia drivers are pretty well straightened out and some patches have been released, things are running better than ever.

Well, no I work for a small private internet provider that is part of and electronics store. I actually do run Vista and it is quite fast, feels far smoother than XP. We use it on two of the systems in the back without any issues, neither of which are powerhouses. As well I use it on my home system which is somewhat stacked performance wise, however the general feel of the os is preferable to XP on it. I'm often curious if Vista bashers have ever made use of it.

Honestly though who upgrades? and for that matter what business upgrades an os on existing hardware? At least Ive never seen it done. Any that I have dealt with are usually still clinging to 8 year old hardware and the only time an upgrade comes into play is when it dies and gets a forced upgrade. Personally I don't believe in "upgrading" an os on an existing box for the mainstream user. It's just a waste of time, use the machine up buy a new one for 1200 bucks in three years preloaded with Vista. If you do want to upgrade though it isn't the big bad deal people think it is.

User account control? I barely find noticeable. I don't know about the offices where you come from, but the ones here are chock full of morons that you cant trust not to fill their computers full of viruses and spyware. Heck every machine we use thats not in the service department is deep-freezed for that reason. I doubt however based on the level of misuse I see on a daily basis of XP machines however that UAC is going to stop the unbelievable carelessness of some of the people getting malware-ed out there.

However. People that get a new computer after the end of this year will likely be getting Vista whether they like it or not. Since oem shipping is going to end, and I doubt new users are going to reload the systems to get Vista off with an old XP key. I mean they wouldn't be THAT big a bunch of anal technophobes would they?

"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007